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So what's the earliest known AI solver for calculus textbook problems? I bet it goes all the way to the 1950s. This quote seems to be massively misleading: Bu

So what's the earliest known AI solver for calculus textbook problems? I bet it goes all the way to the 1950s. This quote seems to be massively misleading: But it’s clear that the team has answered the decades-old question — can AI do symbolic math? — in the affirmative. “Their models are well established. The algorithms are well established. They postulate the problem in a clever way,” said Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of the AI research group OpenAI. “They did succeed in coming up with neural networks that could solve problems that were beyond the scope of the rule-following machine system,” McClelland said. “Which is very exciting.”

rst 6y ago
Grace Hopper was experimenting with symbolic differentiation of functions in her A-2 compiler in the 1950s, and she may well not have been the first. My reference for this is her paper in the proceedings of a 1957 British conference on "Mechanisation of Thought Processes" -- if you set up an account at archive.org, they may let you page through it here: https://archive.org/details/mechanisationoft02nati/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/mechanisationoft02nati/page/n9/m...
- mkl 6y ago
  Not AI, though (or almost every computer program would be "AI"). Differentiation can be done with simple deterministic rule following.
  - rst 6y ago
    Earliest reference I'm aware of for integration is James Slagle's MIT Ph.D. thesis work, from 1961. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11997 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11997
    - deleted 6y ago
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